Free-agent safety Eric Reid wants the NFL’s new collective bargaining agreement invalidated over language added after the ratification of the pact earlier this month. The defensive back is calling for an investigation and a revote.
On Monday Reid’s lawyers wrote in a letter to the NFLPA that said, the CBA posted on the players’ association’s website after the passage of the agreement by a 1,019-959 vote on March 15 contains language different from the one that the players signed off on. The letter from attorneys Ben Meiselas and Ray Genco highlights a difference in wording in the section about the league’s disability plan that affects hundreds, and potentially thousands, of ex-players who applied for Social Security disability insurance payments before Jan. 1, 2015. In the version the players received and approved, those offsets applied only to players who applied after Jan. 1, 2015.
On Monday, the defensive back wrote in a series of tweets as a vocal opponent of the agreement and provided screenshots of the CBA agreement that showed the language added after players approved the deal.
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The NFL denied the comment and the NFLPA told the ESPN it is withholding the comment until their attorneys review the current information. Meiselas told reporters Monday that the discrepancy was discovered when lawyers were “working with families of disabled players to guide them through the process.”
“We’ve been obviously critical of the CBA from the outset because it takes from disabled players. And so in advising them, we were looking at it and pointing out where they had issues and where they were going to be likely getting less money,” Meiselas said. “And then we saw it, and we go, ‘I don’t remember seeing this in Paragraph B.'”
Reid thinks that a revote seems like the “only logical answer.”
“When there’s a potential manipulation of the language to an agreement, what’s the alternative?” Meiselas said, adding, “We’re waiting on an explanation at this point.”
